Computer software applications allow users to create a variety of documents to assist them in work, education, and leisure. For example, word processing applications allow users to create letters, articles, books, memoranda and the like. Spreadsheet applications allow users to store, manipulate, calculate, print, and display a variety of alphanumeric data. Such applications have a number of well-known strengths including rich editing, formatting, printing and calculation.
Recently, markup languages such as hypertext markup language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) have been developed for placing data into a format that may be consumed by a variety of different types of applications. HTML is used primarily for formatting data for publication on Internet-based web pages. Extensible markup language (XML) has been developed for applying structure to data to allow the data to be consumed by a variety of other applications. For example, a document prepared with a word processing application may be saved in an XML format, and a spreadsheet application, for example, may subsequently open the XML formatted document for presentation to a user via the spreadsheet application. One markup language may also be transformed into another markup language where the second markup language is required by a consuming application. For example, XML markup may be transformed into HTML for viewing the transformed data using a Web browser. A common way of transforming XML markup into HTML is by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) files that may be used to define how a given XML markup should be converted into HTML.
Often users of word processing applications construct irregular tables for presenting data, text and/or images. For example, an irregular table may be a table comprised of two rows where each row is broken into a number of cells of varying widths causing the overall table shape to lack definitive Cell Columns. Unfortunately, if the user creates such an irregular table and then desires to save the document using a markup language like XML that will at some point be transformed into HTML, then there can be virtually no way of defining the XSLT transform file that will convert that XML file into HTML that would result in a correct rendering of that table in the browser or the application supporting that particular markup language. For example, if a word processing document is used to create an irregular table containing numerical data and it is subsequently saved as an XML-formatted document, and that document is subsequently transformed into HTML using an XSLT transform file for display using a web browser, for example, the XML markup of the document during the saving process has no way of describing the exact positions of the table cells within the irregular table so that the table can be easily expressed as HTML and viewed in the browser without losing its original layout. Consequently, there is no easy way to use the XSLT transform file to display the XML-described table in an HTML-based browser the same way it was displayed by the creating application.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.